treati.se and run.tc

Yeah, since I am continuing graduate studies, I wanted thes.is, but that was no where to be found. Then, I found that manuscri.pt was for sale, and sent an offer and waiting for a reply. I hope he doesn’t expect a whole lot, because it’s a bit long for my tastes but it is a catchy name. At that point, I pulled up thesaurus.com and started looking for a couple of options, which lead to treati.se. So whatever I write during my graduate studies better be pretty profound and earth-changing in order to merit a domain name like that, eh? While going through the esoteric domain extensions, I ran into .tc and found that these were relatively inexpensive, so picked up run.tc, which is a nice short name.

About the .mp domains from my previous post…. looks like I’m not going to get them after all! It appears that Saipan Datacom, the company that manages mp, is defunct and mismanaged or just completely sleeping at the wheel; or actually plain and outright fraudulent. When you go to your favorite registrar and whois lookup .mp domain names, a lot of really good domain names look available. Then after waiting for two or three weeks the registrar will refund your money because Saipan Datacom is unresponsive. If you look into the situation, like I did, you will find that the owner’s of Saipan Datacom have put in DNS record for just about every dictionary word or word combination, but have not registered any whois information. They are sitting on all the good ones themselves! Sad thing is that Saipan government officials probably don’t know anything about it. That’s typical of that part of the world. Guam and Saipan are the two places on this planet that are doomed to mediocrity, at best. They’ll never get out of the little island mentality, so be it. Moving on.

mail.mp and proxy.mp

Mail.mp was kind of expensive, but too good to be true. There were also a couple others available at a small premium, but will scoop on those later, hopefully. I am currently applying for bit.mp, which has been in the application process for a while and may not get. Going to find some kind of service to run off of this one to generate traffic and revenue. A great SEO name and everything! Let me know if your interested in co-development or purchase.
On the other hand, proxy.mp speaks for itself. A great SEO name and drive private proxy traffic through for hits and adsense revenue; unless some other brilliant idea comes along. 

oproxy.net

Yesterday I had a hankering for a somewhat generic .net domain. There was a time in 1992 when I almost registered internet.com, and it was available. Or, it may have been internet.net, since I cannot remember that clearly. At the time I thought it would be totally unethical, so didn’t. But times change, so I picked this one up. It was the last preceeding vowel ‘proxy’ available. All the other generics with good combinations are taken, such as www, mail, smtp, dns, domain, name, etc…

After registering this I decided that I would put it to good use. There are many people across the world who cannot connect to the internet and see the sites they want to see. These people are always looking for a good proxy service to serve up proxied pages, so they can view their favorite sites. With my arsenal of domain name and hosting options, combined with the fact that parking these domains does not generate that much revenue, I’ve decided to create proxy services and put a few ads on the proxy interface. Here’s what I have done over at DomAux and then I threw a SSL certificate on oproxy.net for more secure browsing.

BTW, this also ties in a bit with my mssg.it mission. Mssg.it was originally an idea I had to create a messaging - both chat and sms - interface that would not get blocked by WebSense or iFilter at work. Mainly because it would be low-key and relatively unknown. As mssg.it gains popularity, I want to find a way to prevent blocking by ‘sensing’ the block then pushing the transaction over to some kind of proxy. I am very interested in developing something like this, so if you have some knowledge, please share. 

linktra.de

Today’s domain catch. The .de domains are priced right for the consonant-vowel versatility, but many of them are already taken. I thought of this one on the train this morning and went to name.com to check, and just as the page was downloading, the battery in my ipad went dead. I was thinking of a place on the web where blogs could register for link trades, but be a bit more exclusive than what is available. Instead of focusing on volume and SEO, focus on quality and content and create a place where bloggers with real, good content can meet other bloggers that cover the same topic actively. In other words, link trading that is not all about SEO, but link trading that is about connecting good content together. Then, combine this with some kind of search engine!

Now, all I need is the time (far less than most albeit) to mashup, code and finalize.

Selfish Coding

Trying to design something based on a concept that only you understand is one thing. Implementing the design may not be a challenge, except when you get stuck in script and need to explain what you are trying to accomplish. The biggest challenge is rolling out the new implementation for user feedback and testing. At the testing stage new concepts are difficult to really test because most of your testers may not be bonded strong enough to the new concept that you designed and implemented. One of the apps that I am designing right now is basically the antithesis of my work. I am a security professional by trade and often find myself behind a firewall with WebSense, iFilter, or some other web proxy and blocking system, so I cannot use chat, Facebook, Google+, or Twitter. Also, cell phones are prohibited, so that form of communication is eliminated. To overcome this handicap, I started creating a web interface that did all these things, but would not be filtered for a while. In fact, I built this app without the intention of sharing it with anybody else. All good things come to an end.

First mistake was putting an easily remembered domain name on the site. Second mistake was creating a simple, but eye-catching login page with a big dodo bird character on the page. Third mistake was putting a nice (but simple) logo on the dashboard of the application. All of these added up to one of my co-workers looking over my shoulder, then creating his own account. Now, three weeks later I have a little less than 50 happy users.

However, this is going to result in the administrators at the web proxy to figure this out and start blocking. Before this happens, however, I have been studying a variety of techniques for by-passing web filters. Web proxy services seem to the best option, but I already know that this company blocks that option. I am looking for a solution that would somehow detect this on the server side then forward the client to another domain name with mirrored content. iFilter uses meta data in the header as one of the filtering mechanisms and we rely on that for many site filters, so is there a way to find out when you have been filtered against, database that information, then the next time you get a query from the same IP subnet, to dynamically change the header information? Any comments or ideas would be appreciated. Collaboration would be great, since this kind of solution would be a good research/coding project.